The salesman, who just sold me a knock-off Celine bag, said something I couldn't understand into a walky-talky hanging from the wall. He had to check if the coast was clear, he explained. After his co-worker up front squawked back to him, he led us out of the cramped back room, through the secret door cut into the store's false rear wall and back out onto Canal Street. It was the second false wall my friend and I had passed through that day on our quest to buy knock-off designer bags for the magazine's Fashion Week-inspired Nine of a Kind, in this Sunday's issue.
Both uptown and downtown, leather bags get the kind of protection usually reserved for harder, shinier things — but for very different reasons, depending on the neighborhood. At Bergdorf, where I went to acquaint myself with this class of object earlier in the day, the saleswomen frequently excused themselves to retrieve keys to liberate the costlier bags from glass display cases, so that my friend could show me why someone might spend a month's worth of TriBeCa rent on a bag. I probably handled $20,000 worth of leather goods.
Luxury goods like this have a heft and beauty that's difficult to articulate — they're substantial-feeling, the fixtures are heavy, the clasps feel precision-engineered — but the price tags tucked in their nether-regions accomplish what words cannot. Knowing I wasn't going to buy a bag (ever) and knowing that the saleswomen were keenly aware of this (and work on commission), and knowing, on top of that, what my afternoon would consist of, I almost felt bad for touching them. But not really. They are, after all, bags.
It's difficult to advance the argument that counterfeiting luxury goods is O.K., or even good for luxury brands — though it has been done — but it's easy to sympathize with people on either end of the business. The guy who sold us the fake Celine in his downtown hidy-hole explained that his girlfriend kept hassling him to buy her a real one. She wouldn't settle for the knock-off, he told us, but a real Celine is far too expensive. He lamented the fickleness of fashion — who knows what she'll want a few months from now? It was hard to tell if he was just making small talk or delivering an apology for his line of work disguised as small talk. He wanted $75, but I talked him down to $50.
These back rooms are increasingly rare, according to a Crime Scene column published in July 2011, but they do provide at least some parallels to the Bergdorf experience, insofar as both of them are indoors. Indoors, the salespeople are friendlier and the prices are fairer than what you encounter on the street, which is where most of the knock-off sales have apparently moved.
These streetside sellers manage to combine the ease of ordering at a Vietnamese restaurant with the charms of buying a ticket on the Chinatown bus to Philly, with all the paranoid complexity of a West Baltimore hand-to-hand. Once you're led to a seller (often by the men selling perfume in the front of the shops), you'll be presented with a laminated picture menu of counterfeit bags: Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, each with a little number scrawled next to it. Once you've made your selections, your seller will make a phone call, and some minutes later another person will come by and drop off a bag full of bags, and, with a drug runner's finesse, keep moving. (Apparently these come from nearby stash houses.) These streetside dealers use the harried nature of the deal to their advantage by starting with obscenely high prices, but they'll come down if you're persistent.
In Chinatown, there exists a third way of selling fake bags, one that doesn't require false doors or stash houses. While some stores just sell fakes out in the open, we encountered a couple shops that have nonbranded knock-offs that hide in plain sight. It's made clear that if you buy, it will become something more impressive, either by the substitution of a designer's label for a generic one, or by attaching a label where none was before. We picked out two totes in a shop on Hester Street, one white, one black, both "like Prada." After a trip to a nearby ATM, we returned to find them adorned with Prada labels. The label on the white purse was attached in the strangest possible location on the bag: below the flap, too far from the bag's edge and too close to the center, and slightly crooked. I suppose it's just as well. The bag most closely resembles a Fendi, anyway — Prada makes nothing like it.
My friend said the most chic bag she saw on Canal Street was the iconic "I Love NY" tote bag, incidentally one of the few officially licensed bags we encountered. I'm more partial to the Fendi/Prada, though, for its brash Chinatown honesty. Quite literally, we bought it for the logo. It didn't matter which one.
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